"One Foot Ahead of the Other"

Ramp

Artists:

It's weird to think of Zomby, the anonymous, frequently masked electronic artist, as a known quantity. But the months since Zomby's November, 2008 full-length, Where Were U in '92?, have seen the rise of dubstep subgenres purple and wonky, and have welcomed newcomers Joker (whose face we know, yes, but who won't tell us a fucking thing), Gemmy, and Guido, among others.

So it's with an air of relative... familiarity that we greet Zomby's "One Foot Ahead of the Other", the shuffling title track from his new EP. "One Foot Ahead of the Other" is, perhaps, the first Zomby track we could truly call "reserved," deploying the rhythm and hum of your standard household appliance: contained, machinated pulsing. Zomby also outfits the track with compacted, mini-bass drum blurts and, briefly, a sampled, instructive voice echoing the song's title. It's also quintessentially a Zomby track, carrying on in a reserved, playful manner for just more than three minutes. It's probably the first of Zomby's original works that no one will bother to ascribe any sort of scene-defining aesthetic to, but Zomby's tracks move at such speeds that even a slight bump or divot can send them careening in unseen directions. For now, Zomby's digitized bleat'n'grind still has plenty of velocity to propel it.